Artemis II's toilet is a moon mission milestone

Role of Toilets in Space Missions

• Toilets are framed as a core enabling technology for serious human spaceflight, not an afterthought.
• Several comments treat toilet design as a litmus test (“brown M&M clause”) for whether a crewed program is realistically engineered.
• Human waste is described as hazardous in a sealed microgravity environment: risk of aerosolized feces causing infection, eye damage, equipment faults, and potential mission failure.

Engineering and History of Space Toilets

• Early Apollo systems are characterized as “engineering-success / user-experience-failure”:
  • Fecal bags were time-consuming (tens of minutes), skill-intensive, and prone to spills.
  • Suit design (rear flap) and need to knead germicide into bags made the process unpleasant and risky.
• Shuttle and ISS toilets use suction and mechanical systems (e.g., spinning tines, compacting nets) with replaceable containers; malfunction scenarios are likened to a “poop snow globe.”
• Backup “Apollo bags” still exist; earlier shuttle systems required commanders to periodically compact waste, considered very stressful.
• Prior systems often depended on separating solid and liquid waste, which some astronauts (especially women) found difficult; Artemis’s toilet reportedly handles both together.

Artemis II Toilet Issues

• During Artemis II testing, the toilet initially failed to move waste into collection bags, triggering extensive troubleshooting with a dedicated “toilet lead” and procedures.
• Resolution involved a power cycle, prompting humor about “turning it off and on again” and “ejection” messages on the NASA stream.
• Some see this as evidence of serious, real-world engineering; others are frustrated by the lack of technical detail in the article.

Human Factors, Training, and Culture

• Microgravity makes defecation mechanically hard; gravity’s absence magnifies small design annoyances into major problems.
• Suggestions and debates include: two-person assistance, robot arms, catheters, diapers, and even centrifuge toilets; many are rejected as uncomfortable or impractical.
• Simulating the problem on Earth is hard: parabolic flights give only ~30 seconds of zero-g; neutral buoyancy is limited.

Broader Reflections and Critiques

• Commenters link waste management to municipal plumbing on Earth and global sanitation gaps.
• Some criticize spending on space toilets while many people lack basic toilets; others argue astronauts are not “elite” and space budgets are modest compared to other industries.
• Multiple comments generalize: all life and even machines produce “waste” (entropy), so waste management will always be a central engineering problem.